Let me start off by saying this game is amazing and that everyone in this community including Jlv has made it come a long way. But it seems that we will be hitting a plateau here very shortly. I think were at the point were the game is being very limited by not being optimized to take full advantage of computers with multiple cores and graphic cards. Erode is literally killing the game and could be fixed with some optimization. I usually run around 60fps when playing any track. With a 40 man gate in national races the erode is so bad that it doesn't even appear until I'm 10-15ft in front of it, yet I still get 60fps. This shows its not my computer but the game having trouble keeping up. Ive seen Jlv talk about optimizing the game before but it keeps getting pushed back for some reason. Id rather get an huge optimization over-hall to the game rather than minor snapshot updates or server updates. We need to show Jlv that we want to continue making progress with the game and to do so we need him to optimize it. Can we get this at the highest priority?

jlv wrote:Is it the actual shape of the ground or the shading that isn't updating quickly enough?

During Checkerz's erode test yesterday, I experienced a problem with the erode showing up too slowly, especially the first few laps since he had the limits set so that the track eroded very quickly at the start, then slowed down the rest of the moto. It worked great for forming lines, but those first laps it's crucial that you can see the lines happening in as close to real time as possible. I kept falling because the ground was deforming right under my tires from the people a couple bike lengths ahead of me. This was the actual shape of the ground. At reshade delay 8, I wasn't seeing shading updates until basically the next lap. I tried turning the reshade delay to 0, which helped and actually didn't hurt my fps too bad. However, the shape of the ground still had a hard time keeping up.

I recorded a for a bit during the race. This is from lap 3 (I'm tiptoeing through the track because of the shifting terrain, and because when I started screen recording my FPS dropped to like 12fps. The terrain was shifting like this before I started screen recording though.):Direct link: http://openlightpictures.com/pub/MXSErodeTest.gif

Would it be possible to predict like it does for the other riders and update the shading only (if that would work) and update to the actual terrain a bit later (reshade 8?) with the actual terrain? If it would work, maybe a predicted actual terrain update would work? Perhaps then you could get the change instantaneously under the bike rather than the bike that is in front of you, his erode showing up right as your own bike passes above it?

jlv wrote:Is it the actual shape of the ground or the shading that isn't updating quickly enough?

The actual shape and shading of the ground was my issue. In the thunder valley national race about 20ft+ in front of me the track looked completely smooth, then when I get close enough it instantly jumped to large amounts of erode. It might have had to do with the 40 riders on the track as the erode usually doesn't do this when i'm testing by myself.

When compared to regular tracks with a lot of riders and no erode the temperature of my computer easily remains 120F or below. On the national tracks with erode it wants to burn itself up at 180F. With the upcoming races ill check to see how the individual cores are performing. I have a feeling its over stressing 1 core and thats whats causing all the heat. If it were spread across multiple cores possibly this wouldn't be occurring.

I am also on a macbook pro but 2017, 2.8Ghz I7, 16gb ram with SSD using wineskin.

Wahlamt wrote:Would it be possible to predict like it does for the other riders and update the shading only (if that would work) and update to the actual terrain a bit later (reshade 8?) with the actual terrain? If it would work, maybe a predicted actual terrain update would work? Perhaps then you could get the change instantaneously under the bike rather than the bike that is in front of you, his erode showing up right as your own bike passes above it?

For the terrain tessellation the part that updates incrementally is the max error array. What that does is tell the tessellator how much worse any particular triangle will look if it drops to the next lower detail level. That lets it use less geometry for flat areas even when they're close to the camera. It's hard coded to recalculate 8000 entries per frame right now which must be too low when the track is changing quickly. I'll make it adjustable.

Guggen wrote:The actual shape and shading of the ground was my issue. In the thunder valley national race about 20ft+ in front of me the track looked completely smooth, then when I get close enough it instantly jumped to large amounts of erode. It might have had to do with the 40 riders on the track as the erode usually doesn't do this when i'm testing by myself.

When compared to regular tracks with a lot of riders and no erode the temperature of my computer easily remains 120F or below. On the national tracks with erode it wants to burn itself up at 180F. With the upcoming races ill check to see how the individual cores are performing. I have a feeling its over stressing 1 core and thats whats causing all the heat. If it were spread across multiple cores possibly this wouldn't be occurring.

I am also on a macbook pro but 2017, 2.8Ghz I7, 16gb ram with SSD using wineskin.

Sounds like the max error array is falling behind as I described above. Shouldn't be hard to fix.

I might thread the erode code as it's very parallelizable and it's getting to where I'm running out of other optimizations for it. But I do think people overrate threading as an optimization. Compared to the initial code it's running over 10 times faster now and reshade delay lets you basically eliminate it entirely. Just threading the code would have maxed out at a 2x improvement on a dual core laptop. Threading will be more of a help for people running on slow but wide CPUs like the AMD FX series.

Josh VanderhoofSole Proprietorjlv@mxsimulator.comIf you email, put "MX Simulator" in the subject to make sure it gets through my spam filter.